Mr. Speaker, as you may be aware, I am the vice chair of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. I wish to speak to this question of privilege and in support of it, particularly the second part.
Before I do, in fairness to both the committee and the committee chair, it must be noted that the committee chair approached the table of the House and received advice. It was upon this advice that the committee entered into the arrangement that my friend questions. I believe what has happened subsequent to receiving that advice is that events, particularly on the part of one of the advisers, David Taras, have overtaken and indeed we have unintended consequences.
My friend quoted from Donald Savoie who said “Questions of accountability and how public servants relate to their ministers and to parliament are fundamental issues of governance. When you pull one lever, a whole series of issues, some unforeseen, can surface.” Indeed that has happened.
I would like to quote very briefly from a letter I sent to David Taras today. It says:
As an important part of our consideration of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage entering into a contract with you, we raised the issue of the many requests you receive for public commentary on political issues.
There was discussion about an understandable restriction of publicizing your opinion on matters relating to the issues under committee consideration. Additionally, we expressed concern about working with an advisor who made statements that were either intentionally or inadvertently hostile to the goals and objectives of the Canadian Alliance.
We cited the following examples. Would the Liberal committee members feel comfortable with your participation if, hypothetically, you publicly agreed with Warren Kinsella that the Liberal membership sign-up rules are racist? Or if you hypothetically agreed, in print or broadcast that the NDP was a spent force because they had no new ideas since 1960?
Well, here's an example that's not hypothetical.
This is from April 10. The headline by The Canadian Press was “Six Alliance Dissidents Seek Return to Fold”. This is a direct quote from that article. It says:
David Taras of the University of Calgary said the party [Alliance] still must tackle the image of having too few visible minorities, too few women and too few young people.
“The amount of building they still have to do is extraordinary,” he said, adding it is still unclear whether Harper would “be dead on arrival in Ontario” in the next election.”
My letter to David Taras goes on to say:
Your first statement is a simple restatement of [the chair of the national caucus of the Liberals] slamming the Canadian Alliance Party with political spin. We knew we were going to be attacked by our opponents with untruthful statements when Mr. Harper won the leadership. We also knew there would be a pick-up of the Liberal spin by “experts” and “talking heads”.
I say to him that he is one. Later in my letter, I say:
If you were to do some research you might not continue to parrot the Liberal spin. The 'image' of which you speak is grossly inaccurate. That image is perpetuated and strengthened by independent [so-called] 'experts' who don't do their homework...
The point of this correspondence is we would find your participation in our committee work more beneficial if you were to keep your musings about the electoral future of the Canadian Alliance Party out of the public domain.
We wouldn't expect our committee clerks or researchers, who are in the employ of Parliament, to be quoted in the media. [The heritage minister] and elected partisans can keep their spin in the media without the help of consultants who moonlight as political experts.
My point which is in support of the second point of my colleague, my Liberal friend, is that indeed we rather foresaw these consequences but now we have the unintended consequences. If someone from the table here in the Chamber, or the clerk of the committee, or library of parliament officials or any of our experts who served the committee made comments like David Taras made, Mr. Speaker, I would hope you would fire them.
In this instance, because we have entered into this relationship with these so-called experts through the back door, indeed my privileges along with those of my friend and I dare say any other politician in this Chamber, have been breached.